Lawmakers' Preferences for Bureaucratic Discretion: The Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 and the Telecommunications Act of 1996

Research on delegation stresses that chief executives are “privileged actors” well positioned to influence bureaucratic policy decisions. Therefore, legislative coalitions provide less authority to agencies when they disagree with executives about what policy should look like. Otherwise, executives would take advantage of voluminous agency discretion to direct bureaucrats to make decisions inconsistent with legislative coalitions’ policy goals. I stress that, in the U.S. lawmaking system, congressional committees are also privileged actors. As such—as with the president—those who experience policy disagreement with committees should wish to limit bureaucratic discretion. In addition, I examine individual lawmakers’ preferences for bureaucratic discretion to evaluate this perspective on agency design. As policy disagreement increases between senators and the Senate committee that oversees the agency/agencies receiving authority, senators prefer to limit the volume of discretion agencies receive.     

Explaining State Budget Punctuations: Policy Transparency,Political Institutions,and Electoral Incentives

What factors cause policies experiencing long periods of stability to be interrupted occationally by a short period of large changes? This study argues that electoral incentives might influence the search, supply, and processing of information on constituency issues, as well as the associated cognitive or institutional frictions, and thus determine the presence and variation of punctuated policies. This article develops and evaluates this claim within a systemic framework consisting of policy transparency, political institutions, and electoral incentives. For the purpose of identifying policy punctuations, this research uses the Generalized Pareto Distribution in the Extreme Value Theory. This study analyzes budget spending data collected from FY 1988 to FY 2008 for all 50 American states. This study finds that greater policy transparency is associated with larger spending stability. By contrast, greater gubernatorial competition is more likely to produce extreme spending changes. Electoral incentives shaped by public preference and political term limits have a profound impact on nonincremental policy changes. The impact of policy transparency is conditional on public preference, while that of electoral competition and legislative professionalism is moderated by political term limits. Particularly, a transparent policy consistent with public preference and legislative professionalism with term limits are more likely to give rise to punctuated policies, while gubernatorial (legislative) competition leads to less punctuated changes when governors (legislators) are subject to term limits.     

Punctuated Equilibrium and Bureaucratic Autonomy in American City Governments

Several recent applications of Punctuated Equilibrium Theory (PET) have yielded compelling findings linking institutional design and change distributions, yet, much more work needs to be done to understand institutional arrangements that make punctuated processes more or less likely. In responding to the recent call for more research on unraveling particular mechanisms through which bureaucracy moderates the odds of policy punctuations, this research explores the potential of bureaucratic expertise and professionalism in fostering rational decision making, and thus the stability in change dynamics. One important feature of urban government receives close attention: the position by professionalized, trained bureaucrats in municipalities (city manager and chief administrative officer) and the effects of their discretion on altering municipal budgetary change distributions. Analysis of a novel dataset of fiscal policy changes, charter and census information of city governments in the State of Michigan, 2005–11, suggests city governments, on average, produce change patterns that conform to the expectations of PET; more importantly, it reveals that heightened levels of managerial discretion can have a significant implication for helping cities experience less abrupt, punctuated budget changes. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of these results for PET, policy change dynamics, and the design of city-governing institutions.     

The Reagan “Mandate,” Public Law and the Ethics of Policy Change

The development of post-election polling techniques makes it possible to examine the nature of electoral mandates more precisely, and therefore to compare them with the mandate claims of winners. On that basis, we can more accurately assess the limits of the “administrative presidency” in individual cases. This article first summarizes the evidence regarding the 1980 Reagan mandate, and then proceeds to describe prominent cases in which his administration tried (with uneven success) to reverse or greatly re-orient purported statutory intent. Finally, it sketches some propositions regarding the appropriate limits of policy change in the absence of changes in organic statutes, and evaluates the cases discussed in light of these propositions, suggesting that a legitimate part of executive discretion revolves around how to reach statutory goals but not whether to pursue them. It concludes that the limits of what has to be permissible for effective operation of the system are probably broader than critics of any particular president's policy positions may prefer to see.     

Agency Characteristics and the Use of Executive Orders

Past scholarship has offered varying explanations for why presidents choose to use executive orders. However, to this point, much of what we know of unilateral powers does not adequately address the role the bureaucracy plays in the president's decision. This research seeks to account for bureaucratic factors as a strategic presidential consideration in the employment of such directives. I classify executive orders from 1989–2012 based on which agency or agencies they apply to, and consider the importance of various characteristics (e.g. agency ideology, level of centralization, politicization, etc.) in determining which organs of the bureaucracy presidents will direct executive orders to generally. The results provide evidence that the White House directs fewer executive orders to agencies that have a politically independent leadership structure, and this result holds across a variety of measures judging an order's impact. The results demonstrate that the type of directive is crucial in determining a president's strategic decision to use executive orders, in line with previous research, and that agency centralization is one crucial component of this strategic calculation.     

Controlling Forum Choice and Controlling Policy: Congress,Courts and the IRS

Considerable scholarly attention has been paid to litigation and its influence on social and bureaucratic policy. One area of research has focused on interest group litigation. Another area of scholarship has shown that Congress encourages individual use of the courts to monitor and control bureaucratic behavior. In several areas of law, litigants have a choice of forum by deliberate legislative design, which is sometimes derided as “forum shopping.” Little attention has been paid to the dominant national political coalition's ability to encourage forum shopping through legislation and the appointment process. One area of law that the coalition can encourage forum shopping is in challenging tax audits. It can do so through implict legislative signals and the appointment process to influence litigants to sue the Internal Revenue Service in the forum that offers the litigant the greatest chance of success. Given the prominent role of courts in setting and determining policy and given the particular prominence of taxes and tax policy over the past three decades, whether and where tax litigants choose to sue is critically important to understanding the dynamics of both tax policy and tax enforcement, as well as public policy creation and change. To demonstrate the influence of political forces on tax forum choice, I compare tax and district court filings from 1994 through to 2000. I find that as the Tax Court and national political coalition become more conservative, more taxpayers sue in the Tax Court and this “forum shopping” choice is supported by the national political coalition.     

Neutral Competence and Political Responsiveness: An Uneasy Relationship

This essay examines the popular argument that a culture of nonpartisan objectivity within the career bureaucracy can effectively serve the interests of presidents and other political executives. A close reading of the literature reveals that neutral competence has become an ambiguous concept. Moreover, evidence drawn from recent studies of OMB (Office of Management and Budget) and from the bureaucratic politics literature more generally suggests that it may not be realistic to expect that civil servants can be nonpartisan and still satisfy the president's need for responsiveness. Although neutral competence is a highly relevant doctrine in some administrative contexts, it is difficult to reconcile with the goal of political responsiveness in areas where bureaucrats are called upon to exercise political discretion.     

Shopping or Specialization? Venue Targeting among Nonprofits Engaged in Advocacy

Studies of venue shopping have typically analyzed the case of an individual advocacy group or issue campaign rather than comparing venue strategies across multiple groups. Moreover, this literature focuses on interest groups and advocacy coalitions whose principal mandate is to influence public policy. Using original data, we test theories of venue selection among nonprofit organizations that report engaging in policy processes but the majority of which do not self‐identify as an advocacy group. Our analyses explore the “where” of nonprofit advocacy across three different venue types: branch (executive, legislative), domain (bureaucracy, elected officials), and level of government (local, state, federal). Like interest groups, we find that nonprofits shop among both executive and legislative branches and among elected and bureaucratic domains; however, they tend to specialize in one level of government. Geographic scope and revenue source predicted venue targeting, but most other organizational characteristics including age, capacity, and structure did not.     

Executive Branch Management and Presidential Unilateralism: Centralization and the Issuance of Executive Orders

Despite the useful simplifying assumptions of recent work on unilateral power, archival analysis shows the issuance of executive orders is a process rife with transaction costs as presidents bargain with the bureaucracy over formulating their scope and substance. As a result, presidents must create what Williamson (1985) called “governance structures” to minimize those costs, with the Office of Management and Budget's clearance process at its heart. As with legislative policy formulation, presidents assert more centralized control over executive orders (EO) production on items that affect large numbers of departments, on matters of executive reorganization, and on significant matters. Political contexts are trumped by managerial concerns. Orders dealing with implementation of recently passed statutes or other presidential “clerkship” functions tend to follow a far less centralized formulation process.     

Corruption-mitigating policies: The case of Italy

One of the circumstances likely to be associated with the intensity of both investigative and legislative efforts designed to curb political and bureaucratic corruption is institutional reform. Since the characteristics of electoral and party systems seem to be associated with variations in the intensity of anti-corruption efforts cross-nationally, it was reasonable to think that changes in the characteristics of these systems in Italy in the 1990s would be reflected in a corresponding change in the efforts of legislators and members of the judiciary to tackle corruption. Prior to the 1990s Italy's tripolar party system and its numerous concomitants placed considerable obstacles in the way of the willingness and the ability of judicial investigators and parliamentarians to deal with the corruption emergency. The 1993 electoral law reform, the eventual emergence of a largely bipolar party system and the circumstances surrounding these processes considerably diminished the significance of the aforementioned obstacles, yet there has been little noticeable increase in anti-corruption efforts. This is probably explicable in terms of the electoral effects of such efforts and suggests that institutional change is at most only one of a number of conditions that must be fulfilled in order for more strenuous efforts to be observed.     

Partisan Efficiency in an Open-Rule Setting: The Amending Process in the U.S. Senate, 1865–1945

Given significant differences between the House and Senate's amending processes, one would anticipate the Senate majority party to be far less successful when voting on the floor. However, recent work has demonstrated that majority party success on the Senate floor is remarkably similar to the House. We argue that an overlooked explanation for majority party success stems from its ability to control intra-party amending activity through coordination between members of the majority party. Utilizing a new data set consisting of all amendments receiving recorded roll call votes in the Senate from 1865–1945, we demonstrate that majority party extremists refrain from offering amendments despite the relative open-floor setting. Nevertheless, chamber majorities cannot restrict minority legislators from offering amendments designed to force them to cast uncomfortable votes and delay the legislative process.     

BUREAUCRATIC POLITICS AND CONGRESS' ROLE IN WEAPONS DEVELOPMENT

In 1975 Congress required that budgetary requests for selected defense programs be accompanied by a statement assessing their arms control effects. Implementation of this requirement has fallen far short of unqualified success, and several proposals for remedying its failures are now being discussed. If remedies are based on incomplete or faulty diagnoses of the requirement's failures, however, they could exacerbate its dysfunctional aspects. This article suggests that the requirement has been unsuccessful because of an inadequate appreciation both of the political dynamics of the bureaucratic process involved and of the objective problems of these arms control issues. The analysis presented here concentrates on the former and suggests that further legislative modifications to the requirement are unlikely to be fruitful.     

Quality Challenge in Iran's Higher Education: A Historical Review

Higher education at Iran's state-run universities is not supported by a deeply-rooted tradition of quality assessment. For several decades, Iranian universities have not been able to monitor themselves and develop efficient, internal structures of quality assurance. The academics' attempts at internal monitoring have failed, giving way to a system of bureaucratic supervision and control. Recent changes in Iran have given rise to new concepts, including the principle of universities' self-evaluation, based on academic autonomy and scientific freedom. But the dominant tendency in Iran's political structure and administration is still toward external, bureaucratic control. The conflict between more or less advanced texts and typically solid structures is a reflection of inconsistencies within the Iranian society, pursuing its transitional stage.     

Foreign-owned Firms' Campaign Contributions in the United States: An Exploratory Study

This study extends previous empirical work on corporate political activity by examining which foreign-owned firms provide campaign contributions to United States legislators. While numerous studies have examined which domestic firms make campaign contributions, little is known about the propensity of foreign-owned firms to make contributions. Using logit and Tobit analyses, the findings suggest that firm size, legislative issues, foreign ownership, and cultural characteristics are important determinants of a foreign-owned firm's political strategy. The findings also suggest that there are strong parallels between the political strategies of foreign-owned firms and domestic firms.     

Bureaucracies of Blood and Belonging: Documents,HIV‐positive Youth and the State in South Africa

In response to its constitutional commitments and social welfare provisions in the era of democracy, the post‐apartheid South African state is increasingly called upon to provide for the lives and livelihoods of its citizens. These demands have intensified amid escalating joblessness and the highest numbers of people living with HIV worldwide. Over the past decade, antiretroviral treatment (ART) has been incorporated into an ever‐expanding welfare bureaucracy, in which access to state assistance is mediated by the collection and monitoring of biometric, bureaucratic data. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic research in the Eastern Cape, this article explores how state documents bring young people on ART into an ambiguous relationship with the state — one that is at once subordinating and enabling. While social research on ART addresses both the empowering and coercive aspects of treatment taking, less attention has been given to how these modes of participation might be mutually constitutive. In this article, the authors examine how the same technologies that discipline youth on ART might also support and protect them; how welfare dependencies entail paradoxical forms of agency; and how the state's ability to control and to ‘care for’ citizens might be reciprocally dependent.     

The Occurrence and Consequences of Electoral Mandates in Historical Context

This study revisits the debate over electoral mandates by assessing the occurrence and consequences of landslide electoral victories since the 1860s. The study builds on Keeler's (1993) formulation of mandates in terms of the opportunities afforded by an election. Viewing elections as creating policy opportunities allows a more straightforward assessment of the relation between election outcomes and the legislative activity that follows. The idea of policy windows also avoids some of the criticisms directed at electoral mandates. Using public laws enacted from 1860 to 1998,1 find that landslide electoral victories precede less active Congresses almost as often as they precede surges of legislative activity. Using qualitative historical information, I further find that the legislative opportunities afforded by a landslide victory are conditional upon unity of the president's party.     

Sustained Organizational Influence: American Legislative Exchange Council and the Diffusion of Anti‐Sanctuary Policy

Building upon existing literature, we offer a particular model of network policy diffusion—which we call sustained organizational influence. Sustained organizational influence necessitates an institutional focus across a broad range of issues and across a long period of time. Sustaining organizations are well‐financed, and exert their influence on legislators through benefits, shared ideological interests, and time‐saving opportunities. Sustaining organizations' centralized nature makes legislators' jobs easier by providing legislators with ready‐made model legislation. We argue that sustaining organizations uniquely contribute to policy diffusion in the U.S. states. We evaluate this model with a case study of state‐level immigration sanctuary policy making and the role that the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) played in disseminating model legislation. Through quantitative text analysis and several negative binomial state‐level regression models, we demonstrate that ALEC has exerted an overwhelming influence on the introduction of anti‐sanctuary legislative proposals in the U.S. states over the past 7 years consistent with our particular model of network policy diffusion. Implications are discussed.     

Interest Group Competition and Cooperation at Legislative Hearings

Legislative committee hearings have attracted little attention from scholars, yet Schlozman and Tierney (1986) found that testifying is the advocacy tactic most frequently used by interest group lobbyists. I argue that opportunities to testify are valuable enough to lobbyists that they may be willing to put aside competitive differences with rival groups to jointly support committee agendas. I test this argument using data on lobbyist testimony before 20 committees on six issues from 1999 to 2002. The results suggest that whether legislators actually desire competing lobbyists to present a united front behind the committee may depend on the committee's own ideological relationship with the parent chamber. I also find that the attractiveness of the incentive to testify is less enticing to lobbyists when it requires them to compromise their organization's position on issues of importance to their members, or when competition between interest groups is especially great.